The Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH) was recently shutdown. This is not the first time the institution, a legacy project jointly owned by the governments of Oyo and Osun, will be under lock and key following agitation by the university’s chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU. Agitation by workers to get paid as and when due and other demands have not been met by the owner states.
As the future of the students seem to be on a brink, some of the students, who are referred to as Ladokites, shared their ‘agonies’ with www.insideoyo.com. Excerpt.
Ojo Gbenga Samuel is a part four student at the institution’s department of physics. Narrating why he had to ‘unrepentantly’ revert the hope he reposed in the Nigeria’s education system, he said that he had been ‘stagnated’ in ‘year four’ since 2015, adding that he has rechanneled his hope towards other activities that could earn him livelihood as some of his secondary school colleagues had graduated from their various high schools.
Hear him: “It is not as if Nigeria has anything to offer even after graduation. Instead of wasting out time while the university is often locked down because of the lack of funds, I ventured into graphic designing. I am already warming up as there’s such a tendency to set up big after school”, he posited.
The students would have carried out the struggle in a more strategic ways if the students’ union had not been proscribed due to the ’fraudulent activities’ in the last union polls. However, the students’ congress has been restive in its quest to halt the ‘lecturers/governments’ fallouts.
Some of them who spoke with InsideOyo said that some of the members of the proscribed students’ union administration, employed radio and television stations for publicity and media outcry while letters were also written to the Federal Government for intervention and alliances with sister-unions and some other concerned associations to find a resonant voice for the sake of their posterity which has been put on the brink.
An ex-parliamentarian in the students’ representatives council, Amobi Wasiu Akorede, gave insight on how best to end the incessant ‘No Pay, No Work’ choruses of their lecturers. “In the case of LAUTECH, two heads are not better than one”, he established, saying that “it will be in the best interest of the students if the Federal Government rises to take over the management of this institution since Oyo and Osun states are not financially buoyant to do so.”
Findings by InsideOyo showed that many students of the institution have taken to anti-social acts, ever since they got ‘distanced’ from their books.
Oyedeji Ahmed, who is the mouthpiece of the students shared some of the repercussions of the crisis on his colleagues.
“In spite of these industrial actions, some hooligans have hijacked our protests to perpetrate evils for their own advantage, breeding conflicts and disunity in the body of students. All of these sabotage our efforts as we strive to resolve boiling issues on ground”.
While some of the male students have been wooed into cyber crimes, , because of the idleness, he revealed that their female counterparts are not into ‘oloso’- prostitutions as against the legacy identified with the school.
“Some of our males are now into cyber crimes and the ladies are now exposed to contagious diseases as most of them now engage in prostitution. We appeal to the Federal Government to intervene in this issue to save our futures from the impending wreckage”, he said.
